<p>Hey kids. Newly-minted COLLEGE student here. Congrats on wherever you're going to high school... I'm sure you're going to hate it.</p>
<p>You're going to lose touch with your old friends. The people around you are going to seem so much less cool than they were. You'll probably spend untold hours gazing at their facebook pages wishing it was just one year earlier. You will fail beyond your wildest imagination. More than once. You're going to regret where you're going. Everything will be harder. There will be lots of big, scary people everywhere. There are going to be unbelievable social and parental pressures on you to be cool and to get into the right college. Your parents will seem like more of an authoritarian menace than they ever have before, and at the same time you're going to be terrified that your new friends might somehow discover that your parents still have some control over you. You're going to be in scary situations. You're going to offend people. You will lose friends.</p>
<p>And you will gain new ones. You will fall in love with your new friends. You will fall in love. You will do things you never could have thought you were capable of, and it will feel amazing. You will decide your high school is the best place on earth. You will handle the pressure, and it will make you start to grow up. You will get into college. You will get a driver's license and not know what to do with all this new freedom. You will find teachers who influence you in a way that you won't have been able to understand before. People will rely on you. If you're lucky, you'll get to vote. You will grow up to become one of the big, scary people.</p>
<p>You will experience emotions that you have never experienced before and cannot explain, and you will experience all the old battery of emotions ON CRACK. There will be times when you want to cry but for some reason physically cannot. There will be times when you are so happy you scream, which normally would embarrass you, but you won't care because you are so overcome with joy.</p>
<p>You're going to hate high school. And you're going to love it. It's going to make you into something that seems suspiciously like an adult. And no matter what happens, when it's finally over, you're not going to be willing to give up those last four years for anything in the world, because if you did, you would be giving yourself up.</p>
<p>Hold on tight, kids. You're in for a hell of a ride.</p>